Developing a fuzzy discrete event simulation framework within a traditional simulation engine

Discrete event simulation (DES) has been widely used in construction management in the past. Recently, fuzzy discrete event simulation (FDES) has been proposed as an alternative to traditional DES when dealing with subjective and linguistically expressed information in construction projects. Currently, commercial DES programs can only use crisp values as a time variable and none of them are able to capture fuzzy quantities as inputs. Therefore, in order to employ FDES modeling, development of a fuzzy simulation engine is required. This paper proposes a methodology that enables the development of FDES within available DES engines. The proposed framework has been applied to extend the capability of a construction simulation program.